The Final Diagnosis Read Free Page A

and now he was in number one X-ray room, ready for a gastric series. The X-rays would confirm or deny the suspicion that flourishing in the Bladwick interior was a duodenal ulcer. Jim Bladwick hoped the suspicion was unfounded; in fact, he hoped desperately that neither an ulcer nor anything else would conspire to slow him down now that his drive and sacrifice of the past three years, his willingness to work harder and longer than anyone else on sales staff, were at last paying off.
    Sure he worried; who wouldn’t when they had a dealer sales quota to meet every month. But it just couldn’t be an ulcer; it had to be something else—something trivial that could be fixed up quickly. He had been vice-president of sales only a matter of six weeks, but despite the high-sounding title he knew better than anyone that retention of it depended on a continued ability to produce. And to produce you had to be on the ball—tough, available, fit. No medical certificate would compensate for a declining sales graph.
    Jim Bladwick had put this moment off for some time. It was probably two months ago that he had become aware of distress and a general aching in the stomach region, had noticed, too, he was burping a lot, sometimes at awkward moments with customers around. For a while he had tried to pretend it was nothing out of the ordinary, but finally he had sought medical advice, and this morning’s session was the outcome. He hoped, though, it was not going to take too long; that deal of Fowler’s for six panel trucks was getting hot, and they needed the sale badly. By God, he was hungry!
    For Dr. Ralph Bell, the senior radiologist—“Ding Dong” to most of the hospital staff—this was just another G.I. series, no different from any of a hundred others. But, playing a mental game he sometimes indulged in, he decided to bet “yes” on this one. This patient looked the type for an ulcer. From behind his own thick-lensed, horn-rimmed glasses Bell had been watching the other man covertly. He looked a worrier, Bell decided; he was obviously stewing right now. The radiologist placed Bladwick in position behind the fluoroscope and handed him a tumbler of barium. “When I tell you,” he said, “drink this right down.”
    When he was ready he ordered, “Now!” Bladwick drained the glass.
    In the fluoroscope Bell watched the path of the barium as it coursed first through the esophagus, then into the stomach, and from there into the duodenum. Sharpened by the opaque liquid, the outline of each organ was clearly visible, and at various stages Bell thumbed a button recording the results on film. Now he palpated the patient’s abdomen to move the barium around. Then he could see it—a crater in the duodenum. An ulcer, clear and unmistakable. He reflected that he had won the bet with himself. Aloud he said, “That’s all, Mr. Bladwick, thank you.”
    “Well, Doc, what’s the verdict? Am I going to live?”
    “You’ll live.” Most of them wanted to know what he saw in the fluoroscope. Magic mirror on the wall, who is healthiest of all? It wasn’t his job to tell though. “Your own physician will get these films tomorrow. I imagine he’ll be talking to you.” Hard luck, my friend, he thought. I hope you like lots of rest and a diet of milk and poached eggs.
     
    Two hundred yards away from the main hospital block, in a run-down building that had once been a furniture factory and now did duty as a nurses’ home, Student Nurse Vivian Loburton was having trouble with a zipper that refused to zip.
    “Damn and hellfire!” She addressed the zipper with an expression much favored by her father, who had made a comfortable fortune felling tall trees and saw no reason to have one language for the woods and another at home.
    Vivian, at nineteen, sometimes provided an interesting contrast between her father’s robustness and her mother’s innate New England delicacy which close contact with Oregon lumbering had never changed. Now, in